`Kane & Abel` Grudge-match Off The Mark

November 18, 1985|By Clifford Terry, TV/Radio critic.

In the beginning were the words--the best-selling novel by Jeffrey Archer about ambition and revenge, with a tip of the hat to the book of Genesis.

Now, starting Sunday night (7 to 10 p.m. on CBS-Ch. 2) and running on for four more hours Monday and Tuesday, comes ``Kane & Abel,`` the television-ampersand version of ``Kane and Abel,`` one of those mini-series that is invariably described as ``sprawling.``

And sprawl it does, from 1902 to 1966, starting out like ``Ivan the Terrible`` and ending up like ``Family Feud.`` Most of the time, though, it seems more like the book of Job, spelling out all sorts of troubles in chapter and verse: raping and pillaging by rifle-twacking Huns on the battlefield, scams and swindles by louts in the boardroom, Wall Street wipeouts and suicides, alcoholism and Hodgkin`s disease, bribery and blackmail, stock manipulations and SEC hearings. And, winding through it all, an irrational, 32-year grudge-match between the principals.

The two are played by Peter Strauss, the maestro of the mini-series

(``Rich Man, Poor Man,`` ``Masada``) who appeared only last week on Showtime as Scott Fitzerald`s Dick Diver in ``Tender Is the Night,`` and Sam Neill, best known to American audiences as the star of the PBS series,

``Reilly: Ace of Spies.``

In preparation, both actors had to work on their respective accents. For Neill, reared in New Zealand, it meant nailing down Boston Brahmin, which he does commendably well. For Strauss, it meant studying with--this is not being made up--a one-armed Polish violinist. There are those who will say the results are ludicrous. Not Strauss.

``It was just a matter of listening and putting it together,`` he told a reporter a while back. ``The Polish dialect is not like any other dialect. You don`t lose it in time. You improve your use of articles and verb tense.``

Archer, the source of it all, had been, at 29, one of the youngest men ever elected to Britain`s Parliament, but resigned after losing a fortune in a fraudulent investment. He turned to novel writing, and his first attempt,

``Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less,`` became a British best-seller in 1975. His second novel, ``Shall We Tell the President?`` was a moderate success, but he hit again with his third, ``Kane and Abel`` (1979), a best-seller in the United States (250,000 in hardcover, 4 million in paperback).

The $15 million TV production was filmed in Toronto, New York City, Paris and the Loire Valley. At a press wing-ding in New York last month, veteran director Buzz Kulik (``Playhouse 90`` to ``George Washington``) remarked that ``a mini-series about a couple of people in an apartment somewhere won`t carry an audience for six or seven hours,`` but that ``the conflict between the two men is the kind of story that can bear up under this format.``

Unlike the biblical duo, this particular Kane and Abel are not related, but are brothers under the skin in surviving and conniving. Abel Rosnovski is an immigrant Polish hotel magnate, the illegitmate son of a peasant woman and a baron who passed along the title in his dying moments. William Lowell Kane is a different kind of citizen: a blue-blood banker, the kind of Mayflower-proud Bostonian who, so goes the doggerel, talks only to God.

While Abel is being forced-marched by the Bolshevik pigs across the icy wastes of Siberia, Kane is playing hockey on the rinks of St. Paul`s. He is also nursing a grudge against his stepfather (David Dukes), a cheat as both a husband and businessman whose philandering eventually triggers the death of his wife.

Meanwhile, Abel--unable to prove his baronial birthright--emigrates to the United States, where he gets a job as a waiter, and is subsequently put on as assistant manager of a Chicago hotel by a wealthy Texan (nicely played by Fred Gwynne) who becomes his mentor and surrogate father.

In 1929 the Texan is not only wiped out in the Wall Street crash, but tells Abel that the bank that holds the hotel mortgage is foreclosing. The corporate scoundrel, of course, is the Kane-Cabot Bank, where young William has become a director.

When Gwynne kills himself, Abel inherits his small hotel chain, which, it is obvious, won`t stay small. He also seeks out Kane, who had personally come out against the foreclosure but whom Abel nevertheless blames for his friend`s suicide. ``He was like a father to me and you killed heem--just as as if you`d shot heem out that window himself,`` Abel hisses.

That said, Abel decides that Kane has become his mark, and vows eternal revenge. To nail it down even more, Kane`s stepfather turns up as an insurance investigator after the Chicago hotel burns down, and tells Abel a few lies as he plans his own vengeance. Abel, who doesn`t question his credibility despite the fact that the guy is about to become a Chicago aldermen, declares: ``I would like to see that Harvard boy hung by the neck.``